Today's electronic society enjoys a variety of technologies that assist consumers and businesses in communicating a variety of data, such as textual, graphic, and image information, between devices such as computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), facsimile machines, and others. One of these technologies includes the ability to scan information from an object, such as a paper document or another hard copy media. This information may be directly stored, or further processed (e.g., through optical character recognition (OCR) technology to create a document that may be wordprocessed using an application such as WORD from Microsoft Corporation).
Some systems are limited to scanning a single side of a paper document or other hard copy media. Some of these systems may provide the ability to scan a source such as film or transparency. These systems employ specific controls in order to compensate for and to adequately position the media being scanned so that the information within may be accurately captured by the scanner. Such systems include a single photosensitive device that provides either transparency scanning or face-down scanning of a hard copy media. These systems require a consumer to manually intervene in the scanning process to scan both sides of a paper or other media. For example, the consumer initiates a first scan with a first side of the paper facing a platen of the scanner. The consumer then has to flip the paper over such that a second side of the paper faces the platen for scanning. Moreover, where consumers desire to scan transparent media, they must purchase and use a transparent media adapter and also manually indicate to the scanner that a transparent medium is to be scanned.